A Historical Study on Syntactic Structures in German

从近代起，德语逐渐从中世纪的听觉语言、口语语言转变为视觉语言和文学语言。本文从语篇语言学和语用学的角度来描述这些变化，特别是句法结构的变化。这里使用的数据来自波恩大学的早期新高地德语文本语料库，按体裁和时期收集和分类。本研究的结果可以概括为以下几点：1）在ENHG中，限定动词已经占据了与NHG相同的位置，动词括号结构已经形成。但与NHG相比，其语序仍有相当大的自由度，如频繁的断句。2）语序的几个原则：（1）断句不一定是介词。此外，擦痕与补语和附加语的区分无关。(b)动词和不定式的位置将单词和短语划分为适当的长度。(c)分开的单词和短语的功能是产生节奏。(d)根据信息传递的原理，这些词和短语沿时间轴沿着排列。（4）句子结构简单，意合比形合多;（5）在世纪，表示原因和原因的连词wande分化为weil和dern。前者强调事件之间的因果关系，后者表达一个人断言的理由。这些功能的差异为文本的构建提供了新的思路。6）语序从以听觉和口语规则为基础向以视觉和文学规则为基础转变的时间假设是在世纪。

From the modern period on, German had gradually become a visual and literary language out of an auditory and colloquial one in the medieval period. This study aims to describe these changes, especially changes in syntactic structures from the viewpointof text linguistics and pragmatics. The data used here are from the Early New High German text corpus at the University of Bonn, collected and classified by genre and period. The results of this study can be summarized as below :1) In the ENHG,the finite verb had taken its position as in the NHG,and the verbal brace construction had already come into being. Compared with the NHG,however, the word order was still considerably free as frequent exbraciations show.2) Several principles concerning the word order were observed : (a) A exbraciated phase ist not necessarily a prepositional one. Besides, the exbraciation had no relation to the distiction between complemtnt and adjunct. (b) finitte verb and infinitives are located to divide the words and phrases into appropriate length. (c) The divided words and phrases function to produce rhythm. (d) Those words and phrases are arranged along the time axis, according to the principles of information trasmission. The more important ones are, the more backward they are.3) With regard to exbraciation, the influence of Latin ist not confirmed, and any inclination by Textsorten is not seen.4) Sentence structures are simple, and paratactic ones are more frequent than hypotactic ones.5) In 16th century, the conjunction 'wande', which had meant causes and reasons, had diverged into 'weil' and 'denn'. The former epresses a causal relationship betwenn events, the latter expresses grounds for one's assertion. These differentiated functions proposed new ways cnstruct text.6) It is assumed to be in 16th century that the word order changes from the one based on auditory and colloquial rules to the one on visual and literary rules.